Chinese–Russian economic relations: developing the infrastructure of a multipolar global political economy?

Abstract

This article situates Russian–Chinese relations within a wider emerging infrastructure of multipolarity to consider how such relations signal a complex and multifaceted ‘decentering’ of the global political economy beyond American-centered global governance architecture. Russian–Chinese economic cooperation and economic multipolarity have been some time in the making; however, they are demonstrating new institutional, governance, and reciprocal ‘embeddedness.’ The processes by which such embeddedness has occurred provide the context within which geopolitical and geoeconomic crises are mediated, not the reverse. This article traces emerging economic relations between Russia and China by moving beyond abstract and generalized pronouncements of multipolarity to consider the extent to which such multipolarity is realized via contemporary Russian–Chinese economic relations, and how such relations are constitutive of a post-hegemonic global political economy. The increased complexity of Russian–Chinese economic relations—means that any resultant effects on polarity cannot simply be deduced from each state’s strategic preferences regarding polarity.